Keep the site. Fix what is costing you.
Not every site needs rebuilding. If the structure is sound and the problem is weight, blocked crawling or missing search foundations, targeted work is cheaper, faster and far less risky than starting again.
Three numbers Google actually measures.
Core Web Vitals are the part of page experience Google measures from real visits rather than a synthetic test. There are three, they each describe a different way a page can feel broken, and they are graded on how your slowest quarter of visitors experienced the page — not the average.
- 01
LCP — Largest Contentful Paint
How long until the main content appears. Google's threshold for good is 2.5 seconds. On local business sites the cause is nearly always the same: an enormous unoptimised hero image loading before anything else. Compressing and correctly sizing it is often the single highest-impact change available.
- 02
INP — Interaction to Next Paint
How fast the page reacts when someone taps. Became a Core Web Vital in March 2024, replacing First Input Delay, and it catches things the old metric missed. Chat widgets, tracking pixels and booking embeds are the usual offenders — each one is someone else's JavaScript running on your page.
- 03
CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift
How much the page jumps while loading. Caused by images, ads and embeds that do not reserve their space, so content reflows underneath a thumb that is already moving. It is the reason people tap the wrong thing and leave annoyed.
What else gets checked and fixed.
- 01
Image weight and formats
Serving modern formats at the size actually displayed, rather than a full-resolution photo scaled down in the browser. This is usually where most of a page's weight lives and where the fastest wins are.
- 02
Render-blocking scripts and fonts
Third-party tags and web fonts that hold up the first paint. Most can be deferred, subset or dropped entirely once you look at what they actually earn.
- 03
Crawlability: robots and sitemap
Whether search engines are permitted in and know what exists. Sites do get accidentally blocked wholesale, and nobody notices until traffic has been gone for months.
- 04
Titles, descriptions and canonicals
What appears in search results, and whether duplicate URLs are competing against each other for the same page. Cheap to fix, disproportionately visible.
- 05
Local business schema
Machine-readable detail about what you do, where you work and what you offer. Without it, search engines are guessing whether you are relevant to a local query.
- 06
Redirect chains and mixed content
Every hop between http, https, www and non-www costs time, and mixed content quietly breaks the padlock. Both are invisible in a browser and obvious in a waterfall.
How the work runs.
Measure
Field and lab data for your real pages, not a homepage score in isolation.
Rank by impact
Ordered by what actually moves the number, so effort goes where it pays.
Fix
Applied to your existing site. No rebuild unless the audit says one is genuinely warranted.
Re-measure
The same tests again afterwards, so the improvement is demonstrated rather than asserted.
Worth knowing first.
Will fixing Core Web Vitals move me up the rankings?
It is a real ranking signal, but a modest one, and anyone promising you position one for fixing LCP is selling something. The stronger argument is conversion: people abandon slow pages regardless of where those pages rank, so speed pays whether or not Google rewards it.
Can you do this without rebuilding my site?
Usually, yes. That is the point of offering it separately. If the structure is sound and the site is just carrying too much weight, targeted work is cheaper and far less risky than a rebuild.
My PageSpeed score is 100 on desktop. Is that good?
It mostly means you tested on desktop. Google ranks on mobile data with a throttled CPU, and the same page frequently scores dramatically lower there. Mobile is also where your customers actually are, so it is the number that matters.
How do I know it worked?
The same measurements, before and after, on the same pages. Field data lags by roughly a month because it is drawn from real visits over a rolling window, so lab results come first and the field numbers confirm it later.
Find out what is actually slow.
The free audit measures all three vitals against your real pages and tells you which single change would move the number most.